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Her Naked Skin by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, at the National Theatre

Bain Collection, Library of Congress

We so wanted this play to be good, my friend Amanda and I: the subject deserves a good play, and astonishingly this is the first new play by a living woman to be performed at the Olivier (although the qualifications make it clear it's not actually the first play by a woman performed there). You could only wish Her Naked Skin well. But it was less than satisfying, somehow.

Again I wondered whether a little too much emphasis was placed on the visual engineering of this production, just as I did with the Revenger's Tragedy only a couple of weeks ago. Yes, you might say as Michael Billington did in the Guardian that the play is "excitingly staged" - the row of cage-cells raised above the revolving floor dominate the scene throughout, and the varying angles we were shown did at least allow cell interior scenes to be clearly distinguished from collective prison scenes. There was a feeling, though, that all this was being done just because it could be done; and we certainly wondered whether this play was really suitable for the Olivier at all. I think it would have worked well in the much more intimate Cottesloe. To be fair, I didn't feel, as I did when watching the Revenger's Tragedy, that the lavish efforts put into equipment meant insufficient attention had been paid to the tone of the production.

The performances were strong, with the exception of the actor playing Keir Hardie, who entirely failed to conjure up a righteous, committed radical and gave us instead something like a mild, bumbling but well meaning Liberal lord. Lesley Manville played Lady Celia Cain well, showing us a woman with a real emotional deficit but whose surface coolness prevents her from accepting herself and saying yes to what she needs. Jemima Rooper played I thought the easier part of Eve Douglas, the working-class girl who gets involved in the suffragette struggle and with Lady Celia. It was a silent, monosyllabic part of a rejected, misunderstood and underestimated girl, but she played it as well as you could hope for. Susan Engel gave real life, too, to the doughty campaigner Florence.

The problems were with the play. The first issue I had was with the language: early on, one of the suffragettes uses the word feminist, a word which may have been in use by the time the play is set - just before the First World War - but which surely was not commonly in use among the women imprisoned for smashing windows. Was it? Of course, as a spectator you can have it both ways: even if use of the word is well justified by deep historical research, unresearched scepticism from the audience about things like this is to be expected and in my view avoided by the playwright. On a more mundane level, no male prison officer in 1913 could possibly have read the sports section of a newspaper, even if he wanted to - this kind of thing disrupts both the historical illusion and your trust in the playwright.

The main problem, though, was what I'd call a general lack of depth. Some of the scenes - between Lady Celia and her husband, for instance - lasted hardly a minute or two, giving no time for real connection between the characters, or for revelation. The problem of drama is how to see inside characters' minds simply by looking at what they do and hearing their words, and deeper interaction is needed than this, if that's to be achieved. What happened between Eve and Celia that made Celia finish the affair? Why did she finish it? We couldn't say. Nor did the play get underneath what we all know, or think we know, about the suffragette movement. It didn't surprise us or say anything new, and at the end I didn't understand any better why Celia and Eve became suffragettes than I did at the beginning. This play is a sort of monument, really, something to make us meditate for a while on the suffrage movement and pay our respects to it. But as well as being a monument to the past, it stands as a reminder of our own time's obsessions, because by choosing to focus on a lesbian affair between women of different classes Rebecca Lenkiewicz is very much a playwright of today: these are our interests, the kind of thing graduate students are researching into right now and that Sarah Waters writes novels about. For me, though, that was a very comfortable approach to take: we were never made to feel the challenge and the shock of the suffragettes' civil disobedience and how they were treated. Even the force-feeding scene I thought lily-livered. The Olivier audience could have taken much more discomfort than they were subjected to, and I think should have been. I remembered a similar scene in a BBC drama on the same subject when I was little - I think it must have been one of the series Shoulder to Shoulder produced by Verity Lambert. The memory of that is much more shocking and affecting than anything in Her Naked Skin.

What was interesting was how much better the play got in the second half when its focus narrowed from the politics to the personal. Had we had more of that - learned more about the characters, understood their changes and differences - it might have been a more substantial evening. As it was, we were left with a play of two halves which didn't quite meet or gel.

Michael Billington was much more positive than me, but how he could call the force-feeding "one of the most horrifying scenes on the London stage", I don't know. Paul Taylor in the Independent mentioned the blinding in King Lear, which in my is much more horrid, and Philip Fisher, too, ejoyed himself more than I did. Georgie Hobbs is even further away from me, though. Can she really have thought this play "horrific"? Unlike her, I felt the portrayal of the brutalised doctor let us off a hook, somehow: the play would have been much effective politically had we had more sympathy with the non-suffragette characters. I did feel contrary to her view, that we were indeed given an "easy feminist ride". I think the West End Whingers are spot on, though, and they even mention Shoulder to Shoulder and Sarah Waters, too.